Wednesday, 4 May 2011

The unlawful killing verdict in the inquest into the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protest relied heavily on video evidence shot on a digital camera by a member of the public, which was unearthed by a Guardian investigation.

The Metropolitan police initially denied Tomlinson, a 47-year-old newspaper seller, had contact with officers before his death at the G20 protest in London on 1 April 2009.

However, six days later the Guardian exclusively revealed the existence of the video, which showed an officer appearing to strike Tomlinson near the Bank of England at Royal Exchange Passage.

The Guardian handed the video and a dossier of evidence over to the police complaints watchdog, the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

An IPCC investigator and a City of London police officer visited the Guardian's offices the day the video went online, Tuesday 7 April 2009, to be handed the dossier. They also asked for the video to be removed from the website, claiming it was "jeopardising" their inquiry and not helpful to Tomlinson's family – a request that was declined. The video came to light due to the investigative work of Guardian reporter Paul Lewis, who tracked down the man who shot the footage, a fund manager from New York who was in London on business at the time of the G20 protest.

In its submission to the IPCC the Guardian also included a sequence of photographs, taken by three different people, showing the aftermath of the attack, as well as witness statements from people in the area at the time that were collected by Lewis for a series of articles about the circumstances of Tomlinson's death.

Lewis later won the 2009 Bevins Rat Up a Drainpipe award for outstanding investigative reporting and reporter of the year at the 2010 British Press Awards for his work on the Tomlinson story.